Kristina Knight - Breakup In A Small Town

It wouldn’t be okay, Adam thought. It couldn’t. Not as long as he was in this chair. Not as long as his brain wasn’t working. Nothing would be okay for his family as long as he was sick. And he was tired of being the reason everyone in this house walked around on pins and needles all day.

* * *

JENNY BUCHANAN SAT on the pretty, plaid sofa in her living room, staring at the ceiling. She’d gotten the kids to bed a little while ago, and still hadn’t heard a peep from Adam. Her husband of six years had retreated to the guest room after the after-school fight. The guest room where he’d been sleeping since coming home from the hospital three months ago.

The guest room where he’d made it clear she wasn’t wanted. Or needed. Or even invited.

God, she hated that guest room. If she could, she’d set fire to it so she never had to deal with it again. Burning down part of the home she’d built with Adam wasn’t a solution to their current problems, though. As satisfying as it might be.

Her mother’s chattering voice continued through the phone line, but Jenny had stopped paying attention five minutes before. She wasn’t sure if the occasionally muttered uh-huhs and okays she offered were for the poor turnout for her mother’s annual Coats for Kids drive or for the fact that her father still hadn’t fixed the loose downspout on the side of their house. Either way, she didn’t really care.

It wasn’t even October yet. The first cold snap hadn’t hit southern Missouri. In fact, they had yet to see nightly temperatures drop under the seventy-degree mark. And, really, what was the big deal about a downspout that was only slightly off center? There were bigger problems in the world.

Terrorism, for one.

Her husband’s continued depression/anger/denial of the very real medical issues facing them since the tornado that nearly destroyed their town, for another. Not to mention the business issues. She and Adam had made big plans to turn Buchanan Cabinetry into Buchanan Fine Furnishings before the tornado hit; his parents had been mostly retired, splitting their time between Slippery Rock and Florida when they weren’t traveling the country in their RV. Since the tornado and Adam’s hospitalization, though, they’d moved home to Slippery Rock full-time and were now back to running the business. Straight into the ground.

The elder Buchanans had “mislaid” messages from the company suppliers, and when a furniture outlet in Springfield called to ask about a new partnership, they had refused to even consider the option. That was a partnership she and Adam had been working on for months, and his parents had killed the plan without even consulting her. Or Adam.

Adam’s response had been to shrug his shoulder, get a bottle of soda from the fridge and wheel himself back into the guest room, where he shut the door and turned on the television.

When she knocked on the door, trying to talk to him, he’d simply turned up the volume until she left him alone.

She didn’t know how to reach her husband. She hated her job.

She hated her life.

More than any of those things, she hated that she felt so helpless in this situation. “Mother, I’d like to talk about me, please,” she said, detesting the whining note that came into her voice. She wasn’t whining; she’d called for advice. But in typical Margery Hastings fashion, her mom had steamrolled right over Jenny’s needs and straight into her own.

Margery didn’t respond well to whining, though, so Jenny backtracked. “I don’t mean to belittle your problems, I’m sure Dad is just focused on work. You know, the bank was hit really hard by the tornado.”

“It isn’t as if they had to rebuild,” Margery said, her voice stiff with self-righteousness.

No, the bank hadn’t had to rebuild. They’d had to create loans for local businesses to rebuild, had dealt with construction companies that needed to expand to deal with the devastation, and had to explain to their corporate bosses why capital outlay had increased so much in a single quarter.

“What I meant was that I really do need your advice. I’m just not sure how to reach Adam. He’s...not the same man that he was before the tornado.” As frustrated with Pre-Tornado Adam as she’d gotten from time to time—she’d begun to refer to him as that—she would take that reckless, carefree, playful man over the dark, depressed man living in her home any day.

“Well, what did you expect, dear? He was in a devastating tornado, trapped in the rubble of a building for nearly a full day before help arrived. Now he’s dealing with a debilitating medical condition that is only barely under control—”

“You’re right, you’re right. I’m being too hard on him.”

“You aren’t being hard enough on him,” her mother said, and Jenny shook her head. She had to be hearing things, right?

“Mother, he’s having seizures because of a terrible head injury.”

“And you’re defending his continued ill behavior. I’m not sure why you expected anything different. He is one of those Buchanan boys. Neither of them took a single thing seriously when they were in school. I still don’t know why you had to marry him.”

Because she loved him, and she’d been eighteen and foolish enough to believe that no matter what they faced, love would be enough to get them through. She didn’t think she could love Adam out of this dark place, though.

She wasn’t even sure she wanted to try.

Jenny squeezed her eyes closed. God, she was a bitch to even think those words. Adam was her husband; of course she wanted to try to fix him. Fix their relationship. Fix their family.

“Well?” her mother said, sounding impatient.

“I married him because I loved him,” she said, and Margery pounced.

“See, right there. You loved him. Not you love him. Loved. Past tense. Jennifer Anne, there are times that you stand by your man, and there are times you have to be honest with yourself. This is one of those times.”

One of which times? Jenny didn’t know. She wanted to stand by Adam. She loved him—not past tense, but now. As frustrating as it had sometimes been to deal with him being the fun, friendly, never-disciplined-the-kids dad, she loved the man he had been. Sometime in the past few months, though, she had lost that man, and she didn’t know if he even existed any longer. It was as if the tornado stole the Adam she knew and replaced him with this angry robot of a man.

“I love him, Mother. Love. Present tense. Being frustrated at our situation isn’t a good reason to...to change that.” She couldn’t say the D word. She couldn’t. She didn’t want to divorce Adam. She wanted to wake him up. To bring him out of whatever place the tornado had left him, and move forward.

“Well, I’m not sure how I can help you, then. I just got in from bridge club, and need to have dinner ready for your father in fifteen minutes. Call me when you come to your senses,” she said, and the phone clicked off.

Jenny turned the receiver over and over in her hands. “That was a brilliant move, Jen—call dear old Mom for advice on one of her bridge days.” She replaced the receiver and went into the kitchen. She poured a cup of coffee into her favorite owl mug and sat at the counter, drumming her fingers on the granite countertop.

Frankie’s army men were strewn around the living room, despite her three warnings that morning for him to clean them up. Jenny sighed and crossed the room. She gathered up the little green men and tossed them into the basket at the end of the sofa. A stack of Garrett’s drawings were wedged under the couch and she pulled them out.

Garrett had drawn a picture of their house, with stick figures of Adam, Jenny, Frankie and himself standing before it. Jenny smiled. She and Adam appeared to be holding stick hands in the picture. She put the paper on the sofa, and froze. The next picture was the same house, but black clouds circled the roof and squiggly lines appeared to be attacking it. She swallowed hard.